John Waters an Interview

JOHN WATERS AN INTERVIEW 32 CHAPTER 33 GAVIN BROADY JOHN WATERS, AN INTERVIEW spoke to John Waters on the phone in late June of 2010, in the gut of a seemingly bottomless New Waters is eager to own up to the good-natured falsehood of the pseudo-nihilism that constituted his early England heat wave. He was in Provincetown, I was in Vermont; we were both in our underwear. I work. “When I went around saying I wanted my work to have no socially redeeming value,” he says, “it was was naturally reluctant to admit that I’d stripped down. Waters, on the other hand, told me within always a joke. My early movies were not true exploitation movies because I was in on the joke. True exploitation the first minute. movies have no self-awareness. Nobody goes to a Russ Meyer movie to laugh, they go to jerk off. Nobody has I ever jerked off to a John Waters movie as far as I know.” “I’m actually sitting here in my boxer shorts,” he says. “If you came to see me I would put on a John Waters outfit for you. It’d be a beach outfit, but I’d dress up like John Waters for you.” Indeed, the central vein running through Waters’ work has always been fundamentally humane, an examination of outsiders struggling against the homogenizing forces of the world. His thematic territory is thus not far It is a testament to the pervasiveness of Waters’ image that when the conversation began I imagined him as removed from other iconic outsiders-gone-mainstream American directors. The pseudo-innocent fabulations most Americans who know of him probably would: the colorful shirt, the slicked down hair, the iconic pencil of Tim Burton and the satirical, hypnagogic menace of David Lynch are, via divergent trajectories, working with moustache. He is one of the great American sub-cultural brands, a master of manipulating the duality of the same thematic clay as a John Waters project, the mark of which is a fascination with social alienation and personal identity and public persona. I ask him about that: dressing up like John Waters, stepping into the confrontation with oppressive conventionality. Waters has a unique talent for locating profundity in the low, the role of a character he has spent his adult life creating. He laughs off my suggestion that perhaps American base, the human lives rejected as detritus by the American mainstream. culture has become too obsessed with the artifice and the manufacture of personality (or rather the readily apprehended semblance of personality), an obsession that has given rise to inflatable MTV celebrities and “My work was always about people on the outside,” he says, “people mainstream society wouldn’t accept. And vacuous reality television stars alike. it was never about laughing at them, it was about laughing at the world along with them. All humor is political. I ask you to mind your own business, and in a lot of ways, that is a politically correct message.” “If I agreed with that,” he says, “I’d be a fucking hypocrite, wouldn’t I? When no one knew me and theaters wouldn’t play my movies, I almost had to sell the personality just to get the work noticed.” His endurance is a testament to the vitality of this vision – in a culture of brand-managed artifice and fugacious pseudo-celebrity, his body of work has the force of substance behind it, a force which has allowed him to Waters’ candor leaves no doubt that he is shrewdly aware of the value of personality marketing in getting the transcend the camera-ready marketability of the “John Waters” persona. Speaking with him now, Waters has attention of a fundamentally conservative American marketplace. the relaxed bearing of a lifelong cultural outlander who has finally made it to the inside, and who has no qualms about his mainstream acceptance. “Someone once said to me that when you’re a public figure, when you go out, you’re always at work. There’s no such thing as privacy anymore, even for people who aren’t public figures, not with blogs and Twitter and the “I’m an insider now, I’m part of the establishment. I look at my book at number nine on the bestseller list and Internet. I see pictures of myself that someone has taken while I was out at a bar, I didn’t even know I was I think about all the people who are reading my work who were never part of my audience in the early days. The getting my picture taken.” strange thing is that as I’ve gotten older, my audience has gotten younger. So now I’m something like a filth elder, which I think is just great.” In spite of this, Waters is an adamant believer in the primacy of artistic vision over the ephemerality of public perception. I reference a section from his newest book, a collection of personal essays, titled, Role Models, in -Gavin Broady is an author and playwright currently living in Portland, Oregon. He is a contributing writer and editor for The New Professional. which he dismisses a failed attempt to meet Tennessee Williams by saying it is unnecessary to meet the artist; that if you want to meet Tennessee Williams, all you have to do is go back and read his work. So I ask: is it necessary to meet John Waters to understand John Waters’ work? “Absolutely not,” he replies. “You don’t have to meet me, you don’t have to meet any artist. You just have to look at the work. No one would have to meet me. The work should be able to speak for itself.” A native of Baltimore, Maryland, Waters began his career as an 8mm hobbyist, and his early DIY aesthetic gave rise to a string of films that were masterpieces of hyperbolic camp. While his early films were populated mainly by the Dreamlanders, his troupe of local Baltimore actors, performance artists, and drag queens, his crossover 1988 success Hairspray soon put Waters on a trajectory towards the mainstream. Indeed, Hairspray became the first of two Waters films that were adapted for that most orthodox of forms, the stage musical (the second was 1990’s Cry-Baby). Though he is known as a doyen of 70s schlock cinema, a truer reckoning of Waters’ talents must also account for his work on stage (notably 2006’s This Filthy World, a disarmingly funny one-man show), his frequently exhibited collections of visual and multimedia artwork, and his comic, sensitive collections of personal writing. 34 CHAPTER _3 35.

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